Among ceramic electronic components, a multilayer ceramic capacitor includes a plurality of stacked dielectric layers, internal electrodes disposed to face each other, having the dielectric layers interposed therebetween, and external electrodes electrically connected to the internal electrodes.
Multilayer ceramic capacitors have been widely used as components in mobile communications devices such as laptop computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, and the like, due to advantages thereof such as a small size, high capacitance, ease of mounting, or the like.
Recently, as electronic products are miniaturized and multi-functionalized, chip components also tend to be miniaturized and multi-functionalized. Therefore, a small sized multilayer ceramic capacitor having high capacitance has been demanded.
To this end, multilayer ceramic capacitors having increased numbers of laminated dielectric layers by decreasing thicknesses of the dielectric layers and internal electrode layers have been manufactured, while external electrodes thereof have also been thinned.
In addition, as various functions of devices such as vehicles or medical devices requiring high degrees of reliability have been digitalized and demand for such devices has increased, there has accordingly been demand for multilayer ceramic capacitors having high degrees of reliability.